


March 01 2021

by DetournementArc



Category: Original Work
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-14 12:49:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29792169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetournementArc/pseuds/DetournementArc





	March 01 2021

I want to want to live. 

\--- 

It was the mid 2010s, I can't remember the exact year. While my peers headed off to college, I spiralled out, working hardly 30 hours a week at a retail job across town. 

I was awake at 5, 6 AM. I couldn't sleep. I felt so sad, and I was so angry at how sad I felt. I remember pacing the living room in the dark hours of morning. I remember resolving to head out. 

The Burnsville Center was a ninety minute walk away. Up along the highway frontage roads, dealership lots and mechanics, McDonald's and an Oriental Market to my right, rushing cars to my left. 

Up the hill where the sidewalk vanished for grassy embankments, where flower-bedighted crosses were common, memorials to those who took the hill too fast on bikes or careened into cars unaware. 

Up a tall hill that cut through the larger townhomes, passing the Cub and the gas station, and down. Through masses of apartments, one of which had hosted DnD nights I had with friends. Was that before this, or after? I can't remember. 

The mall had been the crown jewel of the vapid wants that defined suburbia, and was the narrow escape of someone who had nowhere else to go. It swam in a moat of parking spaces. On other visits, I'd pick unsuccessfully for walking paths across those lots to the countless sattelite buildings for a friend's birthday. 

On other visits, I'd see the mall hollowed out, whittled down to a quarter of it's retail space between online competition and alleged poor management, squads of uniformed mallcops with nothing to do but preside over highly regulated squalor, a concise illustration of the country in years to come. 

On this visit, I headed to GNC. A sales clerk came to me with the usual sales pitch they're all obligated to make. A young man, mid-length brown hair, I think. No idea if he was younger or older than me. I was as agreeable as one is when avoiding upsales without undue rudeness, and made a beeline for the bottle of St. John's Wort. 

I can't remember why I'm this unhappy. I can't remember when it started. Weekly visits to psychologists as early as the 2nd grade. Parents angrily trying to cancel medications and the surprise bills they'd portend. Poems about sadness they urged me not to share because they feared losing custody. 

Years of this. 

I picked up the supplement, and the salesperson upsold me on vitamin B. My goal met, I made a beeline back out. 

On my first walk here, I took my mind off of friends leaving for college with the arcade and candy. I awkwardly refused to speak to the Spencer's employee because of the massive jawbreaker in my cheek, she took it as rudeness, which is understandable. It was sweltering then, the lingering August heat that spills into September. On my walk back with my little bag of pill bottles, it was not. 

I believe it was October, and this time, the cold was seeping in. I was just under halfway home when freezing rain started coming down. I remember bracing myself, step after step, for the hour it took to get back. My arm was so numb and cold I could hardly twist the lock. I can't remember if I managed by levering my whole body or if someone let me in. 

It was a hot shower at my parent's scolding demand after that. 

I remember sitting on my bed, the lower bunk of a blue metal thing we had since 2008, its support beams starting to snap under my no-longer-a-child's weight on the mattress. I remember my dad coming in. I think he asked why I headed out. 

I cannot remember much of what he said. I know I understood it, that his language was perfectly legible, but I couldn't hold onto his words. They rolled off of my brain like water across linoleum, I forgot his words in the time it took him to say them. I remember asking him to repeat himself some three times before he gave up, leaving me to my devices. 

I tucked the supplements in one of the open plastic totes that towered in stacks in the corners of the bedroom my brother and I shared. I do not remember them really helping. 

\--- 

I want to want to live 

\--- 

The tail end of 2016 was unkind. Over the fall, Great Aunt Nancy passed from cancer. A few months later, a tree fell on my uncle at his new lumberyard job-- fortunately he would survive. Two weeks of my parents leaving on new demands for mourning, for loss. 

I remember sitting outside on the bench at work, staring up at airplanes. I remember this burning desure to fly away tempered by the knowledge that flight is a negotiation with gravity, a loan of time off the ground paid for in lift and air currents, that nothing stays up there forever. That was the year my neck got so stiff I could hardly move my jaw. I was already limping through work as my muscles knotted tighter. 

My parents returned after the election, and I thought they'd have relaxed in their convictions when their candidate won. They did not. 

I remember wanting to die. 

I remember failing road tests for my license. I remember the crushing guilt, thinking another mouth to feed kept my parents from leaving that mold-eaten apartment. I remember rushing into my room, beating my fists into my legs over and over and over, raging against this body I hated, this person I hated. I remember telling my dad some boxes fell on me at work when he noticed the bruises. 

I remember asking my mom, angrily, if it'd been better if I just hadn't been born. I remember that feeling of spiralling deeper and deeper into that visceral fervor, that feeling that I could snap and leap in front of traffic, and it would be the first Real moment of my life. The first real consequence. Last month, I had a nightmare about it, that vomitous catharsis of crying out for someone to Kill This Fucking Thing Already. 

I remember January. My dad teasing me about how the new president would have my liberal friends in The Camps. I don't know if he was really joking, it doesn't matter. I remember holding my brother's knife in one hand, the other texting a friend as I looked flatly at the wrist below the phone. 

One day, it hit me how frequently I did this. It hit me how many times friends sent others to check on me, terrified. I decided to move out shortly afterwards. 

\--- 

The year after I sat on that bench in front of Target, my parents off to possibly bury yet another relative; I walked free through Minneapolis and Richfield and Roseville. I prepared for art school with figure studies, and the breeze sweeping up piles of orange leaves felt like it was moving me to where I needed to be. 

School wasn't to be, though. Incredibly overdrawn accounts, begging for money, too scared and sad and exhausted to think. That on top of the casual acknowledgements over and over that only a small percentage of us would Make It. That on top of the guilt. "Trump is president, people are in camps, and you're sinking yourself into debt to draw cartoons" echoed through my head. 

My family urged me to move back. I couldn't. After a few visits with the counselor, I decided to stop going. 

The year that followed was probably the best few months of my life. I came out as nonbinary, I felt my body becoming something I could love. I went on an Art Crawl and attended a Zinefest. 

That October, after my eyes starting to act up, the optometrist warned me of the scars in my retinas, a phantom hanging over me still. 

But I went doorknocking for Bernie. I went to a beer hall with DSA comrades, watching debates over beer and pizza. We braved the cold and talked about our lives. 

\--- 

I stopped going to work in March of 2020. My coworker in the department I just transferred into a few months prior was an older woman who was constantly in for blood transfusions. I was terrified of being one of the Asymptomatic Carriers. So I stopped. It made no sense to participate anymore. 

I remember stress vomiting orange juice and salmon onto my bed. I remember resolving that if this pandemic didn't kill Capitalism, it would kill me. 

In a morbid way, the early months of the pandemic were validating. I threw myself into phone zaps and meetings, desperate to rise to the occasion, desperate to leave the pandemic stronger. I tried to learn about union organizing, about being a bolder, more responsible person. 

The pandemic didn't stop cops from killing our neighbors. It didn't stop corporations from thriving. I sat through the summer of protests, huddled in my house so as not to infect anyone, having dreams of heading out there, of Doing Enough. 

I remember grocery runs through the early months. The quiet energy of eventfulness giving way to a horrified despair that gripped me intermittently. 

I got a job with Union Outreach over the election season. Hours a day wrestling past angry right-wingers telling me George Floyd deserved it, squalling about pedophile rings. The hard part, though, were the others. Old men late in cancer diagnoses that were giving up, people who seemed earnest and kind enough that I hated how robotic I couldn't stop myself from being. 

I was trying to take more responsibility outside of work, too. I remember rushing and stuttering through presentations, turning organizing conversations into stilted messes. I was too nervous on many days to function or work. All the same, I stuck through my job into December, using the little time left to try to do union inreach. More stilted, stunted conversations with frontline nurses. 

\--- 

I've been out of work for almost three months. The holidays, Biden's inauguration, and the Capitol insurrection rolled by, a Shepherd's Tone of exhasperated sighs of relief and new, spanning horrors, leaving me desperate to finally rest. I can't recall how many weeks have passed, trying to fill this body with rest and restoration like filling a bucket lined with holes. 

This pandemic is nearing its one-year anniversary. My DSA chapter is mourning a dead comrade. The cruelty and exploitation seems to survive in spite of everything. 

I am trying to find more union work, something I can do remotely, something the unions need that I can do quietly. If I got a retail job, I'd have to try and unionize it somehow. I'd have to stumble in and organize people who have suffered the year I spent inside, and I don't have the guts. 

I feel all the self-loathing, all that caged-animal frustration that sent me through the cold to that mall. I am looking for the strength that moved me through the freezing rain until my body went numb. I am wanting to put bruises on my legs and I am trying so hard not to frighten my friends because I moved here to keep living. 

I wait to be one of the last ones vaccinated, horrified that some new mutant strain might prove resistant and send us through another year of anti-maskers and economists pleading for more sacrifice and thousands more dead. 

I wait for the Derek Chauvin trial in a week, watching them erect barbed wire fencing and walls, calling in the National Guard. Practically telling us Chauvin will get off scot free. Taunting this city with its forever abused dead, ready to empty more rubber bullets and gas canisters into the expertly cultivated rage they garden in people desperate just to live. We haven't prepared nearly enough. I've been too sad for too long. How much safer would people be if I was doing more? What small margin of help have I denied, and how big will my negligence snowball? 

I wait for Trump to run again, and win again. I wonder how much worse they'll be, how much less resistance they'll face. I wait for The Camps to take us for real. I don't need to wait for them to reopen, though, this last election proving to be just a changing of the guard- if the guards themselves have even changed much. 

I wait. 

I wait for the future worth staying alive for. I have no idea how far away it is. 

\--- 

Before I started writing this, my bones ached, I haven't been able to sleep, my nervous tics keep getting worse. Writing this has helped.


End file.
